Both Google and Mozilla wants to obsolete your OS and move general computing in the browser; Google is more pragmatic and sees the need for native code apps on the client side (like games, image processing, etc) so they wants to transform the browser into distribution platform for such apps. Mozilla crew, on the other hand, holds high moral ground and lives in imaginary world where everything can be made with Web technologies, and if something isn't possible right now, we should just wait couple of processor iterations and couple of Web standard iterations.

If companies are people, Google would be someone like Linus, and Mozilla would hang with RMS.

Brendan Eich posted some thoughts on Pepper recently in this comment and many followups:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4632410

I don't speak for Mozilla, but the position of the non-Google browser vendors in plugin-futures made sense to me: it's simpler to just call the Web APIs from native code. Less code, smaller surface area, fewer APIs for folks to learn.

All I could find. https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-futures/2010-April...